Waterbeds, water mattress beds, and soft-sided waterbeds use a water bladder or a multiplicity of water tubes to provide compliant and body form fitting support while a person is sitting or lying on the water mattress. Additionally water mattresses provide varying degrees of wave motion when a person or persons move on the bed such as when they roll over from one side to the other while sleeping. These are all desirable attributes to encourage restful and comfortable sleep.
Other mattress designs, or standard mattresses, that do not use water employ foam, springs, memory foam, latex, and other compliant materials. Typically, these mattress designs are preferred by the majority of the population and specifically by those who either do not like the wave motion of water mattresses or are bothered with the nature of such mattresses characterized by sagging or lack of firmness. Often, people complain of back pain after sleeping on a water mattress especially if they prefer to sleep on their stomach and to some extent if they sleep on their side.
These standard mattresses have several compromises in achieving a device to provide comfortable and restful sleep to many. Specifically, there always exists a compromise between support and comfort. To achieve a higher level of comfort, designers make the mattress more compliant with softer foam, more compliant springs, soft “toppers” made of softer foam, and other methods. To achieve a higher level of support, designers increase the spring rate, durometer of the foam, avoid soft toppers, and other methods. This compromise affects those people the most who tend to prefer a stiffer mattress. Typically, these people are people who sleep on their stomachs or their sides. The resulting situation is one in which the mattress and bed system is non-compliant to motions and changes of position during the sleeping period. When such a motion takes place, the non-compliancy of the mattress support system often causes the sleeping person to awake partially or fully.
Many innovations and design trends in the mattress and sleep industry have tried to overcome this dilemma. In particular and recently, manufacturers are offering memory foam mattresses, air mattresses that are adjustable to an individual's need for compliancy, latex foam mattresses, a variety of different mattress toppers of many different materials, and others. None of these addresses the need for a mattress that is firm for proper support and has compliance to lessen the detrimental effect caused by the support system not reacting to motions and body position changes.
What is needed is a mattress and support system that allows for any type of mattress, mattress firmness, and comfort level and that also provides compliancy such that it provides a shock and force absorbing motion when a person changes position during sleep.